When a disk drive fails while in the field, it may be returned to the manufacturer for evaluation to determine the cause of the failure so that the manufacturing process can be modified to reduce the number future failures. A disk drive typically fails when it is unable to recover user data written to the disk which may be due to suboptimal operating parameters at the time of the write operation. For example, a write operation may be adversely affected by the ambient temperature, the fly-height of the head, the write current amplitude or overshoot, or a servo parameter, such as the position error signal generated while tracking the centerline of the written track. It would therefore be desirable to store the parameters of a write operation so they can be read and evaluated in the event of a failure.